Hands-On Ghost Recon: Future Soldier at E3 2011

Our Exclusive Preview and Trailer

The beginning of E3 included a new explosive trailer for Ubisoft’s much-delayed Tom Clancy sequel Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Thankfully, the new trailer wasn’t the only E3-associated reveal for the series’ next game because MediaStinger got an exclusive chance to get our hands on the game with associate producer Cosmin-Mihai Raianu.

The mission we played began with the active camo-cloaked squad preparing for a breach-and-clear in a swamp. Supporting up to four players in cooperative campaign play, Future Soldier‘s A.I. squadmates will automatically adjust their sights, which you can see as lasers, to other targets that aren’t currently in your sights or to other targets that you manually tag. This was a nice feature that Raianu pointed out to me (and not the only one during our session) that I had previously missed when playing the game the day before on the showroom floor without any guidance.

After extracting critical info from a tango from the breach and clearing a nearby village full of civilians, we jumped ahead to another part of the mission in which the objective was to rescue an imprisoned CIA agent. Here’s where Raianu showed me how to use the trailer’s remote-controlled drone to get a bird’s-eye view of enemies’ positions ahead and capitalize on the tactical advantage. As I again marked targets for my A.I. squad members, I could see them automatically and slowly creeping to better cover for optical sightlines. After giving them the order to fire, I flanked my way around the battle and eventually regrouped with my squad outside of our VIP’s position.

As we tried to escape while simultaneously covering the VIP and spraying bullets at newly incoming enemies, we got pinned down by two choppers. The game transitioned smoothly to a cinematic cutscene in which we were supported by some sort of artillery thermite that surgically ignited right between the pair of enemy birds, concluding our exclusive demo. I’ve never gotten into the previous Ghost Recon games, but Future Soldier is now on my radar, especially with the impressive Kinect-enabled Gunsmith customization mode. Look for it next year in 2012… as long as Ubisoft doesn’t delay it again.